Lustrous Promises

Guernica World Editions (Guernica World Editions)

978-1-77849-075-0

100 pages | May 1, 2026

To read Lustrous Promises is to enter into a literary ecstasy, a poetic celebration, an invitation to re-see the world for the miracle it is. These are poems for falling in love with life, with the world, with each other. A potent medicine for weary hearts. Steven Nightingale makes the English language sing like no other writer I know—please, please read these poems out loud like the magic spells they are. They’ll transform not only you, but the world.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of The Unfolding and All the Honey

Like Pablo Neruda, Steven Nightingale is a literary and artistic polymorph. Both are consummate guides and contributors to world literature. In Steven’s case, the operative watchwords are “stay tuned,” for I doubt that even he knows what comes next.

William A. Douglass, author of Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World and The Starlight Hotel-Casino

The beauty of this book is its refusal of the dark. It is a wild sensorial delight.

Shaun T. Griffin, Poet Laureate of Nevada

Steven Nightingale’s voice is by turns playful, adoring, elegiac, pungent, amazed. Always attentive, never cynical. These odes are praise songs to the universe of which each atom in each one of us is part. Taste one, they’re magical!

Alix Christie, author of Gutenberg's Apprentice and The Shining Mountains

Dōgen’s insight that “In sacredness, nothing is mundane” might serve as an entrée into Lustrous Promises, which features lyrical odes to water, light, and storms along with equally celebratory odes to the wonders of spoons, luggage, and keys. The magic of this collection lies in its graceful illumination of the simple yet profound insight that the cosmic is firmly embedded in the commonplace. In returning our attention to the wonders of our everyday lives, Steven Nightingale reminds us that the miraculous is inextricable from the quotidian, that astonishment and revelation are never more than a new perception away.

Michael P. Branch, author of Raising Wild and On the Trail of the Jackalope

In Nightingale’s Odes to things of the everyday—dragonflies, a ring of keys, a wooden spoon stirring morning coffee—each shimmers with numen. This exquisite collection reads as sacred writing for our time, an antidote to the rising tide of cynicism wearing at the living world and the human spirit.

Richard Joseph Nevle, co-author of The Paradise Notebooks